


Ab Irato

by sevenofspade



Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: Fix-It, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-27
Updated: 2015-11-27
Packaged: 2018-05-03 15:15:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5296262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenofspade/pseuds/sevenofspade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maya Hansen blows up half the building when she comes back to life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ab Irato

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this back when Iron Man 3 came out, then forgot about it until now.

Maya Hansen blows up half the building when she comes back to life.

One moment, she's dying, her blood spilling on the floor through her fingers, Killian's bullet lodged against her spine and Extremis in the syringe in her hand and the next she's burning, Extremis flowing through her veins and the sweat sizzling off her skin.

She breathes in deep and watches the patterns settle on her skin. Then she breathes deeper and tries not to panic.

There's enough Extremis in her blood to kill her three times over. She'll be dead before the week is done.

No.

She made Extremis; she can unmake it if she has to and remake it if she needs to.

For that she needs a lab, though.

She finds some clothes for herself and sets off in search of one.

With Extremis powering her, she can run fast enough to break the highway speed limit. She makes it to Miami before the end of the afternoon.

Like she thought, there are work crews rebuilding Stark's house. She breaks into the overseer's office and picks up the phone. She uses the speed-dial on a hunch that pays off.

"Pepper?" She says, "This is Maya. Maya Hansen."

Pepper arrives in a suit. Unlike Tony's Iron Man suit, this one fits her and doesn't seem to be equipped with weapons.

"Don't ask," Pepper says.

Maya doesn't ask.

"Tony told me what you did," Pepper says. "He said you died trying to save his life."

Maya brings Extremis to the surface.

"Oh," Pepper says. "Are you, are you stable?"

Maya shakes her head. "I need a lab. SHIELD can't know I'm alive." Her mouth twists. "I will not be anyone's guinea pig."

"I guess you were okay with other people being guinea pigs," Pepper says.

Maya rolls her eyes. "So I'm a hypocrite. Big whoop."

"Hardly surprising," Pepper says and Maya's temper flares.

"Look," Maya says, taking deep breaths, "are you going to let me die or what?"

Pepper ducks her head. "Or what. There's an old Cold War bunker some miles from here, I'll get you want you need."

'Some miles' turns out to be a hundred and twenty. Maya runs them in under an hour. Pepper is waiting for her when she gets there. Whatever. It's not like Maya can break the sound barrier. Can she?

"I don't remember Extremis having a go-fast button," Pepper says.

Maya tosses her hair. "Speed is all about force. Extremis increases the body's force generation. It's just physics. There was so much more that could have been done with Extremis than what Killian's goons did. It generates heat! Do you have any idea what it could achieve from application of simple thermodynamics?"

Pepper is smiling.

"What?" Maya asks.

"You sound like Tony when he's on a roll. Keep going, I like it." Pepper sounds like she means it.

Maya blushes, lost for words, and then says, "So, about this lab?"

Pepper puts back her helmet and the mountain face opens soon after. They step in.

The lab is in surprisingly good condition. Maya suspects it's been used since the Cold War ended. It doesn't seem like Stark to throw away a perfectly good lab.

Her suspicions are promptly proven right by the presence of an ash tree sampling. Ash trees have been the main plant test subjects for Extremis and this sampling can't be more than three months old. It's been watered within the day.

"Just don't let him tell SHIELD," Maya says.

Pepper raises an eyebrow at her. "Because Tony's known for his willingness to share information with SHIELD, or anyone, really."

"Touché. Are you sticking around?" Pepper's CEO, she must have more important stuff to do. Maya hates it when people watch her work, anyway. She has her habits and her idiosyncrasies and she can't abide the thought of anyone messing with either. That's what started her down the path of hating Killian. If the man had just forked over the money and left her well enough alone, she might not be here right now. She certainly would have spent more time working and less time dealing with his nonsense.

"Do you want me to?" It sounds like the kind of question that only has one acceptable answer.

Maya sighs. "Just stay out of my way."

Pepper nods and sits down in the farthest corner of the room with a conveniently-left-on-a-table book. It must not be comfortable in the armour, but she probably doesn't trust Maya enough to take it off. Maya doesn't blame her. She has betrayed Pepper's trust once already.

Pepper reads and Maya works.

"Are you hungry?" Pepper asks when Maya is in the middle of unravelling a particularly knotty part of her problem.

Maya loses her thread and snaps, "No! No, I am not hungry, yes, I am sure and would like to be left alone. The last thing I need right now is to be interrupted. I have three days left to fix this. To fix _me_."

"Alright," Pepper says. "There are protein bars in the drawer if you want them."

"I don't," Maya says and goes back to work. Extremis unfurls inside her brain like new shoots in spring after rain. She doesn't know if it's Extremis making her think faster or if she's just that much more motivated now that it's her life on the line, but she feels like she's working faster than she has in years.

Fire burn and cauldron bubble and why is she thinking about Macbeth and the witches?

Ah. Here.

Those three DNA repeat sequences are non-coding instead of coding. If she just... And soon she's lost in the work again.

She figures it out with hours to spare. Turning the stabiliser into an aerosol gas takes her another two. She can't synthesise into as anything else within the time she has left.

She takes twenty five minutes to engineer the gas' release through the ventilation system.

Pressing the button takes three seconds.

Telling Pepper about any of this takes zero.

Perhaps it should have, Maya realises too late.

The gas floods the room and everything burns. Extremis flows through Maya's body rewriting her genetic makeup even as it is itself rewritten. She can only hope her timing is not offset by the aerosolisation. She didn't account for the fact that the vents are fifty years old and how that might impact the diffusion. The world blazes into light and white heat.

Pepper is naked when Maya wakes up. She's also unconscious, but at least she's not dead.

When Maya crawls closer to check more closely on her, she notices Pepper isn't actually naked. There's wiring stuck to her flesh, like a second skin made of living metal. The armour. She's merged with the armour. That shouldn't have happened.

Maya thought Pepper was one of the lucky few for who Extremis attained a natural stable form. Evidently she was not and whatever was used to cure her - and why didn't she say anything, Maya wants to know - had reacted with Maya's solution, to this result.

Damn it. Damn it all.

And here Maya didn't want to attract attention. Why ever did she think that would work? People are going to notice when the CEO of Stark Industries start breathing fire. If not SHIELD than at least the tabloids and then SHIELD for sure.

"Ow," Pepper says. "What happened?"

"You are now a superhero," Maya tells her. "Rejoice."

Pepper sits up. "I don't think I will. I don't have time for superheroing. This company doesn't run itself. How did I end up a superhero in the first place?"

Maya tells her and Pepper listens.

"But this time it's definitive? I'm not going to end up with new superpowers ever again?" Pepper is taking it rather well.

"Definitively definitive," Maya says. She doesn't say that this is because anymore modifications of the Extremis gene matrix will mostly cause cellular breakdown.

Pepper says, "Are _you_ going to be a superhero?"

"Someone has to," Maya says, "and apparently it's not going to be you."

"I like Rescue." Pepper stands up and dusts herself off. "As a superhero name, I mean."

"It's very on the nose," Maya says. "Right up there with such master pieces of wit as 'the Hulk', 'Iron Man' and 'Thor'. That last one isn't even a codename from what I gather."

"The God of Thunder does not need a secret identity," Pepper says haughtily. "Trust me, we've tried to get him one, but his face's been plastered ten feet high in Times Square and on several international broadcasts so it seems kind of pointless."

"It does," Maya agrees. "Rescue sounds good, unless you'd rather reconsider your future career as a superhero?"

"Nah," Pepper says. "You go ahead."


End file.
